It’s the Fourth of July in New York City, and that can only mean one thing. No, not fireworks, sweaty subway rides and family cookouts. It’s time for Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island.
The pageant has long been a holiday mainstay in New York, and must-see midday TV across the country. But this year’s event, which tests “competitive eaters” to see how many hot dogs they can madly scarf down in 10 minutes, promises to be unusually suspenseful.
For the first time in almost a generation, the men’s competition, which is set to start at noon, has no clear front-runner.
16-time champion Joey Chestnut was forced to withdraw from the competition last month after he signed an endorsement deal with Impossible Foods, a competitor of Nathan’s that makes vegan hot dogs.
Many viewers tune in year after year to watch Mr. Chestnut go through piles of hot dogs like a wood chipper. News of his departure from the contest was met with the kind of public anguish one might expect for a major-league baseball player, not a man who ate 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes last July 4.
The show will still go on. On Thursday, 38-year-old Miki Sudo easily won the women’s title for the 10th time.
A group of contestants, some of whom traveled to Coney Island from Japan and South Korea.
She ate 51 hot dogs in 10 minutes, setting a new women’s record and surpassing her 2023 total of 39.5 hot dogs. Second-place contestant Mayoi Ebihara of Japan ate 37 hot dogs on Thursday.
After her win, Ms. Sudo thanked her family and the dental school in Tampa where she is studying to become a dental hygienist, and reflected on the pressures of being a mother, a student and a world-famous hot dog eater.
“You feel like you’re juggling,” she said, “you try your best to balance everything.”
George Shea, the event’s larger-than-life emcee, described Sudo as a woman whose “soul shines like magnesium burning against a dark night mountain.”
In an interview last month, Mr. Shea, the charismatic showman who helped elevate the entire spectacle into the sort of event covered by The New York Times, said he was “devastated” by the chestnut situation. Senator Chuck Schumer, a native of Brooklyn, also expressed his condolences what did he say “‘Impossible’ hard news to swallow.”
Mr. Shea said Mr. Chestnut’s endorsement deal left Major League Eating, which bills itself as the “governing body of all stomach-centered sports,” with no choice but to ban him.
“It will be like the day Michael Jordan comes to Nike, who made his Air Jordans, and says, ‘I’m just going to represent Adidas, too,'” Mr. Shea said. “It just can’t happen.”
But the split “opens up the whole competition to new champions,” he said. Their efforts will be broadcast around the world – the competition seems to be especially popular in Asia – and will be shown live on ESPN2 and ESPN3 in the United States. It will be rebroadcast on ESPN twice Thursday night.
The men’s competition was scheduled to begin at noon outside Nathan’s Famous, the Coney Island stand that spawned the hot dog empire.
On Wednesday, those aspiring champions gathered in midtown for the contest’s official weigh-in ceremony. (The contest doesn’t separate eaters into weight classes, so it wasn’t clear why anyone needed to be weighed.)
Among those lining up for the chance to replace Mr Chestnut were five men, some of whom had traveled as far as Brazil, Australia and the Czech Republic. (“I eat dumplings,” said Radim Dvoracek, 33, a Czech contestant. “Hot dogs are hard for me.”)
The favorite to succeed Mr Chestnut as men’s champion appears to be James Webb, 35, a former professional soccer player from Australia.
He said in an interview that he started competitive eating “as a joke” and is now a full-time content creator. Social mediaWhere he posts food videos.
Mr. Shea described him as “the No. 1 eater in the southern hemisphere” and the fifth-ranked competitive eater in the world. (The southern hemisphere has only 10 percent of the world’s population.)
Mr. Webb appeared delighted to be in New York, and said he hoped to one day have a career as a foodie like Mr. Chestnut.
“Joey set the standard that we’re all trying to beat,” he said. “Joey is like the Terminator.”
The hot dog eating contest is the kind of absurd public event that New York City has long been known for. Over the years it has developed its own lore, lore and epic heroes, of which Mr. Chestnut has long been king.
According to outer-borough legend, the contest has been held annually since 1916, when Nathan Handwerker opened a hot dog joint at the corner of Surf and Stilwell avenues in Coney Island.
But like many myths, this one is mostly a myth. The contest actually began in the early 1970s, and in 2010, one of its original promoters, Mortimer Matz, admitted that he concocted the original story in a “Coney Island pitchman style”.
In recent years, the event has been driven largely by the wiener puns and theatrical patriotism of Mr. Shea, who calls it a “celebration of freedom,” and the star power of Mr. Chestnut.
The contest made him famous, and in turn became synonymous with the event – meaning his spectrum has loomed over this year’s proceedings. As the weigh-in ceremony began on Wednesday, Mr. Shea repeated Mr. Chestnut’s farewell story to the crowd, assuring them that he would be welcome to return to the Coney Island event at any time.
Mr. Shea then introduced the first female contestant, Elizabeth Salgado, 32, from Vallejo, California, “the original home of Joy Chestnut.” (Ms. Salgado said her hot dog goal was to “eat as much as I could, just to beat my sister.”)
Representatives for Mr. Chestnut did not respond to a request for comment.
Those who still want to see Mr. Chestnut eat countless hot dogs on July 4 will travel to Fort Bliss in El Paso to compete against soldiers in a five-minute hot dog eating contest. According to the Associated Press.
He will also headline a hot dog eating contest on Labor Day that will stream live on Netflix, along with Takeru Kobayashi, another former July 4 hot dog champion who was eliminated from the Coney Island contest in 2010 after falling out with Major League Eating.
Mr. Chestnut’s path may have put him out of Nathan’s competition — for now, at least — but Mr. Webb said Wednesday that some version of his celebrity status is what everyone in the competition hopes to achieve.
That’s why they spend the whole year training, eating and stretching. (He said his method involves using a foam roller on his stomach followed by a trip to Buffett.)
“We’re all weird,” said Mr. Webb, as a man in a giant hot dog costume danced nearby for TV cameras lined up under the vessel at Hudson Yards. “We are all weird in our own way. But we are hella competitive and very disciplined. And that’s kind of the part that people don’t see.”